Place du Maucaillou: Mitt Romney’s Bordeaux connection

Mitt
Romney, the Republican candidate defeated by Barack
Obama in the 2012 US presidential elections, has often acknowledged his affinity with France and all things French. In this article and the twin feature on Invisible Paris, we lift the lid on Romney's French connections...

The language and the
knowledge of the country is something he picked up during a
two-and-a-half-year stint as a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints missionary to France in the late 1960s, including six months
spent in Bordeaux. During that time he and fellow Mormon missionary Steven Bang lived in an
apartment at number 4, Place du Maucaillou, in the vicinity of the
ever-lively Capucins market. He was stationed there as a 20-year-old
from January 1968, after time spent in the northern cities of Le Havre
and Brest, and ahead of a six-month stay in Paris.

Agence France Presse recently quoted
79-year-old André Salarnier, the former head of the Mormon chapel in Talence, recalling Romney as being a “big and charismatic fellow” who
would “often come to our house for meals and lapped up my wife’s Breton
crêpes”... as well as her coq au vin according to some sources. Salarnier also remembers him as being a “natural leader and a
charming young man who was very open and very much a Francophile”.

On
top of the daily routine of prayer, study and door-to-door
evangelisation as a two-man unit with Steven Bang, Romney’s leadership
qualities saw him take on additional responsibilities when he was chosen
to oversee the work of fellow missionaries throughout south-western
France. The pair also became amateur firefighters on one occasion when
out driving near Bordeaux. Bang remembers them noticing a building which
was on fire. Romney instantly decided to head straight for the building
which they entered in order to help with the evacuation effort.

The view today from Romney's front door in Bordeaux.

Romney was in Bordeaux when the mass strikes of May 1968 broke out,
bringing the whole country to a standstill. Mormon missionaries were
dependent on funds that were sent from the US (they lived on $110 per
month), but the money was drying up. Romney sought alternative means of
obtaining the much-needed cash by travelling down to Spain to withdraw
money from banks there.

On June 16th 1968, Romney was involved in a serious car crash which
occurred in Bernos-Beaulac, 75 kilometres to the south of Bordeaux. He
was at the wheel of the car which was bringing Mormon French mission
president Duane Anderson and others back from Pau, where a small Mormon
congregation had been in dispute.

Their
vehicle was hit head-on by a car driven by a Catholic priest, Albert
Marie, and Anderson’s wife Leola was killed instantly. Romney, who has
always maintained he was not at fault (witnesses claimed Albert Marie
was drunk when the crash took place), was seriously injured. He was even
initially feared dead; the policeman who first reported to the scene
allegedly wrote “Il est mort” (he is dead), in Romney’s passport.

At hospital he
came out of a coma. Four days later he was on a Paris-bound train in a
carriage that had been chartered by the Church. Ambulances were even
authorised onto the platforms at Bordeaux Saint-Jean Station to drop off
Romney and Anderson. (This "VIP" treatment was attributed to the fact
that Romney's father, George W. Romney,
was Governor of Michigan and had until recently been one of the
frontrunners in the race to become the Republican party's candidate in
the 1968 presidential election.)

In December 2011, Romney told supporters in New Hampshire about his time in France, which he described as “not exactly a Third World country” but adding that “most of the apartments I lived in had no refrigerators”. Was it his Place du Marcaillou residence which he recalled when talking about the “little pads on the ground” he would use in the absence of a working lavatory, adding that “there was a chain behind you with a bucket”?

Bathing facilities were also rudimentary according to Romney: “If we were lucky, we actually bought a hose and we stuck it on the sink... and washed ourselves that way.” He also recalled saying to himself that “Wow, I sure am lucky to have been born in the United States of America”.

Well, that could be how he experienced Bordeaux, or indeed Le Havre or Brest… but possibly does not correspond to the living quarters he went on to enjoy in the capital’s chic 16th arrondissement.Invisible Paris takes up the story here…